Boris has always been an expert at saying one thing to the people in the room but something else to people reading about his speech afterwards. Now he’s taking it to the next level. Kudos!
Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
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Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#12I think I've heard about this tactic before, where it was used to help victims of revenge porn. It was used to push unwanted search results for their names away from the top in Google.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#13> I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? Because it makes you look like a fool. Doesn’t mean it won’t work though. Bojo apparently targetting the segment for whom this kind thing goes over their heads
Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Personally I think this is a genius move by Bojo and something that should be applauded by hackers (this is Hacker News after all). It literally hacks the system, and I think it's beautiful.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#14> I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this?
Well there was a story on french president Macron who was apparently thinking of renaming the ENA (one if not the most prestigeous uni in France) to "Institut Superieur des Fonctionaires", ISF in short (http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/l-ena-remplacee-par... sorry it's in French).
But ISF is also the short name of the tax on the richest, which he has gotten rid of amid a lot of controversy.
They didn't end up renaming ENA to ISF, but that would have been a great way to play the SEO game so that searching for "Macron ISF" may have in the future returned results on the school rather than the tax.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#15While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all about? Do we have any inkling as to whether this works at all?
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#16This is actually fascinating (even if it may not be the behavior we expect from our elected leaders). He did the same thing in June where he gave a completely baffling interview [1] about how his hobby was painting models of buses out of used fruit crates. But people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches. I wonder why nobody else is willing…
Maybe they are? Devin Nunes went on a ramble the other day rather than discuss Trump.
It’s to boost the signal of nonsense?
So nation states are pretty much at Orwell level?
“Gobbledygook & toot pickles, primrose!” The idiocracy ejaculated! as they launched the nukes.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#17While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all abo…
No, but it makes the alleged affair look a lot less important. If a news story is not even on the first page of google results, is it even that big of a deal ?
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#18While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all abo…
If I committed murder and wanted to hide the body, I would hide it on Page 2 of the search results. No one goes there.
After all, if the first x results are not what you were looking for, how likely is it that the next x results will provide a match?
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#19They talked about this on John Olliver. They had a bizarre interview where he brought up a story about a bus and people think it is to salt the keywords of Google search to not show a campaign bus that highlighted something like free health care or something like that. Edit: user "sincerely" has a better description and links
Thing that got me was the bus thing was "spiritually" true.
The UK does send a fortune to the EU, and the EU will not spend it on the NHS.
At best they may use it to resurface a road in the UK in some town no one has ever heard of along with a "eu project" propoganda badge.
But the spirit of the message held water, even if it wasnt technically true during tuesday of the second easter of a red moon.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#20The funnier thing to me is the people in the thread talking about how DuckDuckGo finds the "right" results. DuckDuckGo is just Yahoo. I think the results are something like 99.9% the same, so whatever is the 0.1% they add, when I did the search, it results in maybe a slight difference in link ordering. The reason it finds the "right" results is also the same reason its results are such garbage. And this is coming fro…
and Yahoo is just Bing nowadays.